


an arrow to prove a point

by misandrywitch



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Character Study, Elevator Shafts, Metaphorical Suicide, Space Pirates, they're connected..... just bear with me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 14:38:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8756482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: “I want to know,” Peter says, “how you transform a man into a myth?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> endlessly fascinated with peter nureyev's internal complications in regards to his own origin story. endlessly fascinated with peter nureyev's hard femme affinity for sequined smoking jackets & lemontinis & being disgustingly in love when it really makes absolutely no sense. endlessly fascinated by peter nureyev, space pirate????? just trust me on this one, i guess. 
> 
> title's from 'saying your names' by richard siken because of course it fucking is: 'Names like pain cries, names  
> like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented,  
> names forbidden or overused.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
  
Nureyev.

He says it to himself in the mirror sometimes. There’s the worry there - that if he doesn’t say it out loud every now and then it will stop fitting, stop belonging to him, worn out and pushed out of shape. It’s an old habit. Maybe the first one he remembers, beyond the neverending and circadian rhythm of living long enough to see the next day.

When he was young, it meant a connection to something bigger. To someone else, who had also carried that name, that had given him his. Nureyev. A hope. A dream. Some kind of meaning. He holds onto it, a talisman, willed into meaning by the power of repetition and a kid’s imagination. Something much bigger than he is.

A name is an idea. An idea is a symbol, a shield, a tool, a weapon, a turning point, a rallying cry, a weakness.

Some things change with time. Some things don’t.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter’s ten - more or less - and he’s hungry. That’s less a descriptor than it is a state of being. Everyone’s hungry, and if you aren’t it just means you have to start thinking about the next time you will be, and if you aren’t hungry for food then you’re hungry for something else anyway. He doesn’t remember a time when he isn’t, and trying to won’t bring him dinner.

Sometimes he thinks he can remember - a man’s voice late at night. Tall and lean. But he can’t remember his face.

He’s hungry, so he’s picking pockets. He’s good at it. Fast eyes, fast fingers - he doesn’t get caught very often and the few times he has he’s always been able to talk his way out of it well enough. He has the kind of skinny, quick face that blends into a crowd and doesn’t get noticed when he trails someone. Crowded street, busy evening - he zeroes in on a tall man, broad shoulders in a dark jacket. Looks well-off enough that he isn’t going to starve if Peter knicks his wallet, and obviously not paying attention.

The wallet is out of the man’s pocket and stuffed in the waistband of Peter’s pants in half a second, and Peter turns to worm his way back into the crowd and quantify his spoils when he feels fingers catch his arm and his blood stops.

Big man. Big fingers. They circle all the way around Peter’s elbow and he twists and wriggles but can’t break free.

“Excuse me,” the man says conversationally. “I think you have something that belongs to me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister!” Peter spits, still trying to break his grip. He’s fast - if he can slip out he knows he can be gone in half a second, but the man’s fingers don’t budge. Big man. Bearded, with wide golden eyes like an owl’s. “Let me go!” Peter hisses. He doesn’t yell because he doesn’t want to draw any more attention to them than he already has.

“Unless,” the man is almost smiling, which doesn’t make any sense. He should be calling the guards. “Unless you just happened to pick that wallet up off the ground, in which case I’d thank you for returning it with a reward.”

Peter stares at him. His eyes are really yellow.

“A reward,” he says, skeptically. He’s not an idiot. He knows a thing or two about not looking a gift horse in the mouth, but he also knows a lot more about caution.

“Well, sure,” the man says. “You definitely didn’t think I’d notice you sticking your hand in my pocket, and I wouldn’t want you to go hungry. You are hungry, right?”

“Yeah,” Peter says, automatically. He weighs his options. There are always other wallets, and if this madman’s going to be satisfied if Peter hands the wallet back, then that’s better than inviting more trouble. He reaches for it with his spare hand, then hands it over. The man takes it, then lets go of Peter’s arm, and they stare at each other.

He should just run.

But he doesn’t.

The man shoves his wallet back into his jacket and smiles, for real. The corners of his mouth vanish into his beard but it’s a nice smile anyway. And then he kneels down, right in the middle of the street so someone walking behind him gives him a dirty look, and extends his hands.

“I’m Mag,” he says. “You have a very quick set of fingers, young man. What’s your name?”

He has rough, square knuckles and calluses on his palms and he’s the first adult Peter’s ever met that speaks to him like he’s a got a brain of his own in his head.

“Peter.”

“Peter who?”

Peter rolls his eyes, then abruptly makes up his mind. “Nureyev,” he says. “My name is Peter Nureyev.”

And Peter extends his own hand. They’re tiny in comparison but Mag shakes his hand very seriously, like two people in a business meeting.

“That’s an interesting last name,” he says. “It seems like I’ve heard it somewhere before --- well, who knows. It’s very nice to meet you, Peter Nureyev. Do you want lunch?”

Peter does want lunch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter gets older. Sometimes he still goes to bed hungry but it bothers him less because he feels full in other ways. Full of ideas. Full of anger sometimes, and despair others, and hope, and fear sometimes too. The world is so much bigger than his own life, his own need to eat, sleep, stay safe, repeat. The endless grind of survival laid large, and he realizes for the first time that there are places across the galaxy where people don’t look to the sky in fear. It isn’t like this everywhere. It can’t last forever.

Maybe that’s the first lesson Mag teaches him, beyond the need for quicker fingers. That things change. Sometimes they do on their own, and sometimes you have to shove them.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Peter is seventeen - maybe - and he’s contemplating suicide.

Well.

Metaphorical suicide anyway.

Killing someone -- knife to the chest. Not difficult at all. The oldest game in the world, really, and one he’s proven himself to be pretty good at. It probably should have been harder. That probably should bother him. When he thinks about it, his fingers itch.

But killing a name --

Killing Peter Nureyev.

He had a certain kind of conviction about it, leaving Brahma, watching the planet grow smaller and smaller, green and blue and white, out a shuttle window. Leave it behind there to rot, to die. Shed it like a snake crawling out of its skin and emerge as someone new, bright and gleaming. He clutches his new fake passport in his hand and reads the name there over and over and over in the mirror.

He doesn’t look to see if his face is plastered all over comms messages across Brahma. He’s sure it is. It was a bad photo anyway. Embarrassing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So in theory -- easy. Stab it in the chest and leave it to die, a memory of a place like blood in the back of his throat and the whole wide world out there in front of him, all its possibilities and places to see, people to meet, adventures to have.

Peter Nureyev killed the one person in the world who mattered to him. He deserves to meet an ugly end where nobody will look for him.

Brahma feels so small, behind him. It’s one planet, and people die every day, and --

His chest hurts. He dreams of cities falling from the sky.

Mag was always filled with advice, ranging from good to useless. Turned any opportunity into a learning experience. Lesson one of thieving, Pete! Don’t shit where you eat. Always return favors. Wait for opportunity to approach you and shake its hand. When trouble arises - disappear.

Maybe he should have added _Rethink dropping a floating city onto a bunch of people, killing them instantly_ to that list, Peter thinks, and he’d still be alive. _Tell your partner your plans before you force him into them,_ even.

It’s the kind of thing that this new man would leave behind him altogether. But Peter can’t. They’re drilled into him, years and years of repetition, muscle memory that’s impossible to just shake. Something woven into the fabric of him. He starts to revise them, little inside joke, _Peter Nureyev’s Guidelines to Thieving_ \--

 

 

 

 

 

 

But Peter Nureyev is supposed to die.

Why can’t he remember that?

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, in practice -- not as easy as it looks.

The one that Peter always liked the most was about throwing things out. _Waste not want not,_ sometimes, but more commonly, _Dont throw something out that you can turn into a raft or firewood later._ Salvage things for parts. Save them for emergencies. You’ll never know what might come in handy in a pinch.

Thanks for the advice, Mag.

Mag doesn’t have anything to say to that. Mag’s dead.

Brahma’s behind him.

And Peter Nureyev moves forward.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Peter is twenty - though that’s becoming more of a guess as time goes on because Outer Rim calendars don’t align at all with most other places in the galaxy and he’s been all over the galaxy but it’s semantics, really, and not something he really had a firm grasp on to begin with - and he got tired of living hand-to-mouth.

He winds up finding work on a Rangian shuttle craft that’s less of a shuttle than it is a smuggling operation. They almost laugh him out the door because Peter’s a lot of things but he’s not intimidating in the slightest. He keeps getting taller, and leaner, and he wonders still if he looks anything like his father.

When he leaves, rejected, he takes the captain’s wallet with him. The key to her cabin, too.

She hires him right on, after that.

The captain is a huge, formidable woman with arms that are thicker than Peter’s whole waist and a scar on her face that looks like she got it in a knife fight. Jackie Slaughter. Definitely not her real name. Everything about her - her bearing, her laugh, her ability to outdrink everyone else on board the seven-man ship, her temper - says _pirate._ Like the old fairy tales, boats on the water.

“Rani Stone,” Peter offers, when she asks, and she gives him a look that indicates she knows that’s not his real name either.

Fake names are harder than they look.

The war makes it hard for people to get supplies, to travel where they want to travel, even to get word to people they want to contact sometimes, so there’s lots of work. Planet to planet, people ask for Jackie’s help or sometimes Jackie’s trouble. She’s infamous. She’s selective about the work they take and she can afford to be. She asks for Peter’s opinion sometimes and he thinks of himself from what already feels like so long ago - _I want the wealthy to fear me and those in trouble to call for me -_ and sometimes shares what he thinks.

Rani’s not an idealist. He’s not particularly political but he was a street kid too and likes to shove back at people who shove first. He isn’t particularly bothered by the moral implications of anything - in fact, he rarely thinks about them at all. He sleeps with men. He’s pretty good at cards. He laughs a lot. He has no family that he remembers.

“Where you from, kid?” Bryn, the second mate who’s got two silver teeth in the back of his mouth and an extremely fast laser pistol draw, asks his first day on board.

“Who cares?” Peter says. “Bounced around a lot, all over the place. What really matters is where I’m going.”

Fake names are hard but fake identities come almost naturally, like pulling on a coat. Peter buries grains of truth in them, to give them depth.

They coast the Outer Rim, far from Brahma, which feels like an internal compass in Peter’s head. Peter picks locks, Peter outsmarts shipping inspectors, Peter prints fake passports, Peter plays a lot of poker. Peter lays in his bunk at night, four metal walls making up a room of sorts of his own, and mouths his own name. He feels untethered and free, aimless but satisfied.

Jackie lies about where she came from. It’s a running joke.

“Earth!” She’ll say, pouring over flight charts. “Moscow. Or what’s left of it.”

“Rangia,” she’ll announce, filling her glass. “Do I play poker like some colonist, huh?”

Once, she says she’s from Brahma, and Peter nearly leaps out of his skin.

“I know that’s a lie,” Bryn says. “On Brahma they knock people like you out before they grow up. Lasers from above, Cap.”

“It’s a floating city, actually,” Peter says automatically, and Jackie gives him a look.

When they board other shuttles travelling in the Outer Rim, people who know Jack Slaughter is. They see her coming. She likes to let them live, and tells them to spread the word.

“You’re like a real life pirate,” Peter tells her, and she laughs and laughs as they trawl through the shuttle’s cargo.

“Let them fear me!” She says. “If I want ‘em to know I’m coming, they’ll know.”

She registers something on his face, and Peter busies himself with carrying boxes.

“Penny for your thoughts, kid?” She asks, later. Peter is sitting cross-legged on the metal railing that’s suspended above their cargo bay. There’s a glass panel that gives a view of deep space above his head and he’s looking through it. She sits down next to him and punches his shoulder. Which hurts.

“Maybe,” he says. “It’s pretty silly.”

“Listening to Jen recite Rangian love ballads is silly. That’s what they’re all up to, you know, in case you were wondering what you were missing.”

“Opera’s not really my taste.”

“Come on, kid.” She punches him again, affably. “You talk and talk and never say anything.”

“People all across the galaxy,” Peter says slowly, “know who you are. Don’t you think that’s dangerous?”

“They don’t know who I am,” Jack says. “They know who they think I am. They know what they’ve heard, whether it’s true or not. It’s funnier when it’s not. If they saw me on the street would they know? Doubt it.”

“So you don’t think it’s dangerous.”

“It definitely is,” she says. She swings her legs underneath them. “That’s the point.”

“How did that happen?”

“Hard work, kid,” she says. “I didn’t always have my own ship. Or this reputation. It takes work and guts.”

“Sure,” Peter says.

“Why the fuck are you asking?” Jackie looks over at him. She has very bright eyes, very blue, and they don’t miss much. “You think about that kind of stuff?”

Rani Stone doesn’t think about that kind of stuff.

“Yes,” Peter says. “Sometimes.”

“Huh,” Jackie says, and Peter’s skin crawls. “So what’s your question?”

“How do you know I have a question?”

“Because I’m good at reading people. It’s my job. More or less.”

“I want to know,” Peter says, “how you transform a man into a myth?”

Jackie’s eyes twinkle.

“I think,” she says, “you have to do something legendary.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

So they rob a bank.

It lacks a little bit of the style that Peter was really hoping for, but style can be traded for substance and it is his plan from start to finish which counts for something. It’s a Brahman bank but they hit its vault, a man-made metal monstrosity trapped in the planet’s orbit that’s crawling with security but possesses a weak point, an air ventilation system. It’s the seven of them, and they practically walk out with more money than they know what to do with, and several items that Peter knows should belong in museums on the planet’s surface, and one priceless painting that Jackie decides to hang in her cabin.

Peter waits until he knows the security cameras will turn back on, waits until he knows everybody else is out of the line of sight, and then he squares his shoulders and lowers the mask he’s wearing his enough so the cameras will have to pick up his eyes.

“My name is Peter Nureyev,” he says, clear and cold. “I just want to make sure you haven’t forgotten me.”

 

 

 

 

 

They leave a package on the desk of a clerk at the Brahma Museum of Antiquities, and they make donations to several organizations in the neighborhood Peter hailed from, and nobody on the crew asks why Peter doesn’t come with them. He watches the planet through the glass window of the cargo bay in the orbiting ship while he waits, green and blue and white

“So,” Jackie says later, when they’re a long way away from Brahma and their minds have moved on to the next job, the next solar system. “Is that your name, kid?”

“Captain,” Peter says seriously, “if I tell you then I’d have to kill you.” He could no more kill her than he could breathe if she chucked him out an airlock.

Jackie throws her head back and laughs. “You know,” she says and she puts one hand, knuckles battered and tendons strong, on his shoulder, “you’re pretty good at that heist stuff. We could make some real money that way.”

“Thanks,” Peter says, and smiles. “I think it’s really my calling.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

He writes Jack and the crew letters, long after he’s moved on. They say that they recognize his style in his work, and they never rob cargo ships travelling from Brahma.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Becoming different people feels like trying on different jackets.

Some of them fit better than others, some of them take work, and some of them always look like they’re trying too hard. The trick, Peter learns, to making them feel real is to center lives around one singular event or a series of traits. That’s what people really remember, anyway - “that handsome lounge singer with the flashy suits who always looked a bit wistful” is a whole person. Peter writes him in his head, tries him on, gets him to fit right. Fiction, personified. Real and unreal don’t really mean anything all done up in layers and the more he thinks about that the more fitting it feels. In a way, Peter Nureyev was fiction too. Peter Nureyev was a kid orphaned on the street by a father who he doesn’t remember, a father who he dreamed of every night who never existed at all. A story told so many times it became a myth, a thing of belief. But believing in something doesn’t make it true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hardly a stretch, then, to become somebody else. All Peter Nureyev had was his name, and his home, and Peter buries both of those things so deep that nobody can find them. Master thieves keep secrets better than anybody.

It goes like this:

Special Agent Rex Glass.

Peter is presented with an opportunity to get a finger into Dark Matters in order to ensure the sale of a collection of very ancient Brahma tapestries that were removed from the home of a politician by someone he knows. It’s an opportunity worth taking, and also a challenge worth bragging about. Beat the system - spy on the secret agents. Who knows when that could be useful?

So -- Rex. A definitive name, unusual but tidy, one syllable.

“Rex Glass,” he says, over and over and over again in the mirror. He watches the shape of his face as he says it. He considers the hunch of his shoulders, his haircut, his fingernails, the way he walks. Rex Glass has two parents that are still married, and he doesn’t speak to them very often. He walks ramrod straight and doesn’t mind being the tallest person in the room. He doesn’t believe things he can’t see but he does believe in his ability to find out just about anything. He wears well-fitted dark suits and he knows people notice how he looks in them. He uses charm and guile and the line of his smile as tools to get people to trust him. He likes the attention when it’s immaterial and fleeting. It makes him feel important. People think he's an eccentric, and he likes that too. It's hard to stand out when everyone wears the same suit. 

Rex Glass is not an idealist. Rex Glass has never been to Brahma. Rex Glass has killed people, but not with a knife and certainly not in a way that’s anything other than clinical. He has no idea how that feels, and he definitely doesn’t dream about it.

Shoulders square, smile sincere and straight, hair combed back. Practice until it feels natural, and watch him come to life.

He gets some edits, when he meets Juno Steel, because Juno Steel surprises him.

Most people don’t.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

The Kanagawa plan goes south, so Peter calls in a favor and Rex Glass takes a trip to Mars. It was always in the plan for Rex to pick Juno Steel’s pocket - he was leaving with the mask come hell or high water because whoever had hired him wasn’t the kind of person to accept ‘sorry’ as an answer - and Peter’s learned that the easiest way to get close to the contents of someone’s coat is to have a legitimate reason to be feeling them up.

He didn’t expect to want to.

And he really didn’t expect the pair of handcuffs that Juno, pupils wide and pulse quick, slaps around his wrists with a practiced motion.

Beyond all that he doesn’t expect the way Juno’s eyes look, with the lights from the city swimming in them.

“I had it all figured out before then,” Juno says, voice rough, and Peter knows this means Juno had it all figured out when he paused in the cab and suggested Peter follow him home for a drink, and when he poured that drink, and when he let Peter put his hand on his arm and kiss him against the arm of the really ugly couch Juno has in his apartment.

He was busy procuring handcuffs at the same time Peter was busy getting the safe key out of his pocket. And that sends a thrill right through him.

People don’t get the drop on Rex Glass. People really don’t get the drop on Peter Nureyev. Both of them can hardly believe what they’re seeing.

“Who are you really?” Juno barks.

“Oh, what’s in a name, Juno?” Peter says, which makes him laugh. More than you know, Roman goddess -- vital force, divine protector, cyclical renewal. That caught in the face of the angry detective with hunched shoulders and biting moral fortitude, which makes it somehow fitting. Peter thinks about this at the same time as he thinks about the logistics of getting the key back, of where the police car Juno has called will travel and the best place to escape. Of the way Juno’s fingers are braced on the edge of his sofa, his voice, the expression in his eyes, the hair falling into his face --

So he’s distracted.

How on earth did Juno Steel figure it out?

Focus, Nureyev, or you’ll be breaking out of prison rather than out of a cop car --

If he left a clue, Juno could probably follow it.

“I need to know,” Juno demands, reading his mind.

“You may want to know, love, but you don’t need to know,” he says, and Juno bristles all over, furious and defensive and curious and Peter knows, right in that moment, that he wouldn’t mind at all if Juno Steel tracked him down.

He’s lived as long as he has doing what he does by being careful, covering tracks, keeping secrets, always looking forward. Forward is his escape plan. Now stares him in the face -- Juno Steel’s eyes and the way he’d kissed back. His heart hammers. Life is about taking risks, isn’t it? When it isn’t about being careful.

Escape plan, Nureyev, you goddamned idiot.

He says it out loud to see how Juno will react. And he has a piece of paper and a pen in his pocket.

It’s a tremendously stupid idea, but --

Peter once spent a weekend teaching himself to write behind his own back, and he’s never found a real reason to use this particular skill until now. He’s signing his own name when the cops come in.

“Is this our guy?” One of them asks. He’s handsome, but Peter has the sneaking suspicion that handsome men are going to be ruined for him for a long while.

“I could be, officer,” he says, and winks, “if you just give me the chance.”

His last glimpse of Juno Steel, out of the corner of his eye, is Juno with his hands white-knuckled around the neck of a bottle and his shoulders slumped inward and down and his head, framed by the lights of the city. That’s going to stay with him.

Peter clears his throat.

“Gentlemen,” he says to the cops as soon as they’re situated in the car. “How are we this evening, hm?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a bit of work to get them to stop the car right on Mercury Drive. Peter has to hop into the front seat and drive it himself for a few blocks. But it’s worth it, he hopes, as he shoves the cops out onto the sidewalk and ducks down underneath the car to avoid any errant security cameras, to imagine the look on Juno Steel’s face when he sees this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter meets a lot of people, in his line of work.

It’s part of the joy of it. People are, by turns, frustrating and ridiculous and fascinating and strange. Everyone new is a lesson in action, in those funny habits you engage in without realizing it.

If someone were to try and adapt Peter’s own quirks into a false persona, he expects he’d flirt lasciviously, doodle on the walls and wear a lot of well-cut and violent-patterned trousers.

Not too far off, then.

More often than not they’re nothing more than that, passing impression that he studies and internalizes for use later -- the way someone fills a glass or tells a story or laughs or gets angry, not even thinking about it. An odd assembly of parts, the way people express the details of their lives.

And then there are the people who stick with you. The ones you can’t forget.

Juno Steel is one of those people.

Peter finds himself reading Martian newspapers, which he tells himself is a necessity because someone is paying a great deal of money for ancient Martian artifacts and it’s absolutely no good to let an employer know something you don’t. And Juno Steel’s glowering face, printed ink or pixels of light --

He wonders if Juno will give it a shot, follow the clues, add things up. It makes him nervous -- jittery and hot, the possibility of discovery. He knows what Juno could uncover, if he went looking.

Blood under his fingers. It’s a lot more complicated with context.

Peter wonders, sometimes, if there’s a point in time when he’ll stop dreaming about it. When he doesn’t dream about that he imagines the city falling, crushing the streets he still knows by heart and everyone living in them.

He doesn’t know if that would make him feel better, or worse. Value judgments mean less and less every year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juno’s apartment is on the third floor and it’s only a little difficult to climb the side of the building, pick the lock on the window, slip inside and wait in the dark. It’s a bit dashing, probably. And worth it, when Juno turns on the light and stares, wide-eyed and unshaven and handsome.

“Peter Nureyev -- “ Juno barks, all shock dissolving into anger. It’s fascinating to watch it crawl across his face.

 _Yes, yes I am,_ Peter thinks, and he grins and grins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Juno leaves him, he takes Peter’s name with him. That isn’t the kind of gift you can recover when things go wrong. He knew that when he gave it away. One of the risks.

It had been a very long time since Peter -- _Peter_ \-- told someone he loved them and meant it. He knows when Juno responds that it isn’t the kind of thing he says lightly. He doesn’t shy away from it, right then, Peter’s fingers in his hair. The sincerity in his voice makes Peter shiver

And he also knows that Juno won’t be there when Peter wakes up.

Peter’s good at reading people. He knows, as clearly as he knows the best way to pick a combination lock or the right way to smile to get a free coffee or the pattern of the streets in the neighborhood he grew up in, that Juno doesn’t believe he deserves what Peter is offering.

And --

It’s something Peter should have realized the moment he met him, a misstep in understanding how things are linked. He could no more pull Juno Steel out of this city, every towering, red-sand, neon light, bloodsoaked inch of it, than he can tease out the memories of Brahma from himself. Of crowded midnight markets and stolen pastries, warm and spicy, shoved into his sleeves and Mag’s laugh when he got sauce down his beard, and of the heavy hard feeling he got in his chest when he’d watch the next propagandized story read on the news, and the way the planet looks from far away, green and blue and white.

From a distance, Mars is a red marble. From a distance, Juno Steel is another man with a bad temper and a story he doesn’t want to tell.

Both of those things are true, but they’re also not true at all, and Peter is a quick study.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the world is big and full of things he hasn’t seen yet. It always is, no matter what he leaves behind when he leaves. And there are times when he doesn’t mind the opportunity to stop being Peter Nureyev, for a while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something in his gut -- and Peter trusts his gut as much as he trusts his head and his hands and his wit -- tells him that it isn’t over. It’s what he feels when he thinks about Brahma. And six months later, when he’s still working out the specifics of an escape plan from some podunk but remarkably well-run prison on Cyrus 5 only to see the shadow of a very familiar eye wink at him through a guard’s helmet before telling him to run, he gets proven right.

Peter loves it when that happens.

“I’m surprised to see you,” Peter says as soon as they’re free of the building, and Juno coughs.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well. I might be a dick but I wasn’t gonna let you rot in prison.”

“I would have broken out, you know,” Peter says defensively. “I was waiting for the right opportunity.” First rule of thieving, his brain supplies.

Juno’s pilfered guard uniform doesn’t fit him very well, and he’s out of breath, and he scowls. “I can put you back,” he says, “if you want to satisfy your ego.”

“No you’re doing quite well, and I’m interested to see the finale of your escape plan.”

“Nureyev, for fuck’s sake,” Juno says as they flee the city in a stolen patrol car that Juno doesn’t seem to have a clear idea how to drive in a straight line, “I only have one eye and I don’t understand how these brakes work -- don’t -- don’t distract me -- “

“The accelerator’s under your left foot, darling,” Peter says this into the crook of Juno’s shoulder, the line of his neck. “These cars are designed to be operated while the driver’s wielding a handgun. Just watch the road and keep driving.”

“I can’t when you’re -- you -- “ Juno swerves through a red light, straightens the wheel, turns his head and kisses Peter, hard and fast like he means it. “Becoming roadkill really wasn’t on my to-do list today,” he snaps, and whips his head back around. Peter kisses him, right under his jaw.

“Go sit in the back seat!” Juno yells, grinning, and Peter does.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Peter is somewhere in his thirties - it becomes less important every year - and he’s on Mars. He didn’t like Mars much the first time he came here but it’s growing on him. It sticks with you - and not just because you find red sand in your boots and in the lining of your fur coats weeks later. It has a certain complicated charm, the ecosystem of the city and its layers, its facade and its underbelly and its secrets. Hyperion City doesn’t apologize for what it is. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. It asks a lot of the people who live there and the people who live there are suited for it, fighting their way through life in a city that looks as if it should sink right into the sand. Peter’s learned that it has, sometimes, at least parts of it. They build right over the top of it and keep going. Growing and growing.

He says this out loud, and Juno snorts.

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Like a tumor. Or a fungus.”

“It’s too dry for fungi here, isn’t it?” Peter says idly.

“Fine then,” Juno says. “A sunburn. A rash.”

“I’m being serious!”

“I’m gonna take you to Old Town, and you’re gonna get mugged, and you’ll change your tune.”

“I’m not the kind of person who gets mugged, Juno. Honestly.”

“Wearing that jacket in Old Town, you will be.”

The jacket in question is Peter’s prized sequined smoking coat, and it’s currently draped carefully over one of Juno’s mismatched kitchen chairs. The rest of Peter’s clothes, less important, were tossed haphazardly around the apartment a few hours earlier. It’s long dark outside, or as dark as it gets in Hyperion City, and through the window that sits over the foot of Juno’s bed Peter watches the hazy city skyline, cars moving between buildings with their lights on.

“They’re certainly willing to try,” Peter says, and Juno rolls over in bed so their shoulders touch. “It might be an adventure.”

Juno snorts. It’s a funny sound and its meaning can change from irritation to amusement to fondness that he doesn’t want to express. If Peter weren’t an idealist and were a more practical man, he’d probably justify that his coming back here time and time again was an exercise in understanding one detective’s particularly unusual body language, research for later use.

But Peter is only practical by necessity for survival, and he’s more than willing to admit to himself that watching Juno Steel laying shirtless in his cramped bed in his cramped apartment with a glass of Scotch balanced in one hand snorting with derision is a better sight than watching the sun rise on Alpha Praxis 7. And the sunrise on Alpha Praxis 7 is seven hours long.

Impractical men get their hearts broken, but they also accept apologies. Peter’s experienced both by way of Juno Steel in the last year.

“Hey Nureyev,” Juno says suddenly, and Peter turns his attention away from the window and back towards him, lets one hand slide across Juno’s stomach for the novelty of contact. “Gotta tell you something.”

“Make it filthy,” Peter waggles his eyebrows and Juno snorts again, because Peter’s been on Mars for four hours and they haven’t done much beyond falling into bed.

But there’s an expression on Juno’s face that Peter can’t pinpoint, like a cloud sitting heavy in his brows and jaw, the shadow of his nose and hollow space where his eye used to be.

“It might be, uh -- “ Juno is looking the other direction, across the apartment and at the wall, which isn’t a good sign. “Just remember that you, you know, looked into my job history and my arrest record and the size suit I wear -- “

“Oh,” Peter says, confused, “you finally looked me up? Oh, you should have said something, I’d have prepared a speech.”

“No,” Juno snaps. “Well, I did that too but -- “ His eye moves around the room. Juno is a packrat, there’s a lot of things to draw his gaze. “I went to Brahma,” he says, and he says it quietly and very fast.

Peter can feel the space in between one heartbeat and the next as if he’s trapped underwater.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sits up and presses his back flat against the headboard. It’s cold on his shoulderblades. “What?”

“You know,” Juno says and shrugs. “After.”

He doesn’t elaborate but Peter knows what he means, the moment he’s referring to. Private linguistic shorthand - because “I left you in a hotel room on the other side of the city without warning and we both sort of accepted we wouldn’t see each other again except, of course, you got arrested and I rescued you and now here we are,” is too long to say all the time. It certainly doesn’t require the detail.

There are days where Peter wonders if Juno will answer his comms message, or leave ones of his own, or throw out the cheeky postcards or unsigned deliveries of the ugliest art Peter can find on Kessel, or not answer the door when Peter comes knocking, or never arrive when Peter leaves a humorously cryptic message and a fake passport sitting in his inbox. It hasn’t happened so far. Their situation -- Peter refers to it in his head as anything from relationship to working arrangement to an armistice treaty depending on the day -- hovers in the fragility of trust and things they haven’t said out loud.

And -- and this is the strangest thing -- Juno always has the capacity to surprise him.

Most people don’t. And Peter thought he was doing pretty well in figuring Juno out.

He realizes that it’s been quiet for a very long time, and that Juno is looking at him and his face is dark -- thundercloud heavy.

“Well,” Peter says. “Did you think it was going to tell you something I haven’t?”

“No,” Juno says quickly. The expression evaporates. He doesn’t know how he feels. Peter guesses maybe he doesn’t know why he did it, or didn’t know what he hoped to find. “I -- maybe.”

“And did it?” He’s not angry, exactly, but he feels stiff all over. Caught off guard. The image is almost too easy to imagine -- Juno, coat collar up, scowl on, walking through the well-lit and flower-laden nice parts of the city and Juno, looking more at home, in the street Peter still knows as surely as he knows the back of his hand. He could find his way through them blindfolded, if he had to.

His chest aches.

It’s the kind of feeling he can never shake, deep down and through and through. Involuntarily, Peter puts his hand across his own stomach - a protective reflex. And to his surprise, Juno’s hand follows it.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess it did. It’s beautiful. I had no idea. I guess I assumed all those terraformed planets would look the same. You know, man-made and landscaped.”

“The plant life is native,” Peter says, automatically. “For people to live there they have to balance the oxygen levels but unless you have very bad lungs a stroll through the jungle won’t kill you right away. The wildlife might, though. Not to mention their state-of-the-art weapons system that they deploy on a whim, which made that trip really rather stupid of you.”

Juno. Brahma. He can’t make it make sense. They’re things that shouldn’t overlap, different lives, different places, except --

He’s Peter Nureyev, in both of them.

So maybe, in a way, it’s natural. He really should stop thinking there are things Juno isn’t capable of.

“So I’m stupid,” Juno says. “Never pretended to be anything else. A real fool.”

He squeezes Peter’s hand, and Peter squeezes back. He can count the tendons in Juno’s wrist, wiry and strong. He knows Juno is looking at his face.

A kind of promise. Peter doesn’t forget things, and Juno knows that.

“A sentimental one,” Peter says, because he knows it will annoy him. It does. Juno pulls a face, and it’s delightful. There’s a childish novelty in predicting how he’ll react and being correct. An even greater one when he does something Peter doesn’t expect at all.

Which is what he does next.

“They tell stories about you,” Juno says, and something in his voice changes. It sounds tentative, like Juno doesn’t know what Peter will do next. “About Peter Nureyev, I mean. I’m sure police agencies all across the galaxy tell stories about you and just don’t know it.”

“I know,” Peter says. His mouth feels sticky and strange.

“I didn’t realize it. That you -- “ His expression is intense, brows furrowed. “I wondered a lot about how you ended up being the person I met,” he says, finally. He shifts his hand so his palm is pressed flat against Peter’s, so their hands are stacked over Peter’s chest.

That detective’s gaze - picking up clues. Making things make sense. Not a pattern of evidence, but the pattern of Peter’s life. How did he end up here, anyway, from the young man he was to the person he is? The footsteps he walked in often not his own by name. The danger of that. The thrill of it. Peter doesn’t know how to help Juno understand that.

You know what you were getting into the minute you decided to tell him your name, Nureyev. You knew you were handing it over to someone who sees things the way other people don’t, who wants answers, who navigates by his own moral compass even though he seems to believe it’s a bit faulty.

“And I suppose you found answers to your questions.”

“I found out that you robbed a bank and dropped the money into people’s chimneys so nobody would notice,” Juno says, and his eye his bright and his mouth is serious. “And that you rescued the kidnapped daughter of a diplomat, preventing a war. And you piloted an airship through the side of a prison. And that you stole a diamond the size of a chicken egg out of someone’s house and never set off the alarm. Oh -- this one really made me laugh -- that you seduced the viceroy’s wife and then she dumped him never to return.”

“I did, did I.”

“I figure some of those have to be stories,” Juno says, “that didn’t really happen or that you didn’t do. But I also figure it doesn’t really matter if you did or not, because everyone seems to think you did and they repeat it over and over. Big planetary game of telephone with their own homegrown vigilante freedom fighter.”

“Juno,” Peter says, shortly. He closes his eyes. The colors of the city, coming in through Juno’s bedroom window, filter through his lids. Freedom fighters probably do a better job of protecting the people they care about.

“And, listen,” Juno says, and Peter braces himself, “there was this drink. Absolutely fucking disgusting, and I grew up drinking moonshine that we’d brew in a metal vat in the backyard so I know disgusting.”

Peter opens his eyes. “Oh, you didn’t,” he says. “Because if you’re referring to what I think you’re referring to -- “

“I brought a bottle of it home,” Juno says. “It’s in the kitchen.”

“Why in God’s name did you do that?” Peter says, stifling his laughter. “Out of anything -- anything -- you could have chosen as a souvenir -- “

“Well,” Juno says, and he looks sly and pleased with himself, “it was a noxious color and I had the worst fucking headache the next morning. Made me think of you.”

Juno squawks as Peter lunges for him but he’s trapped between Peter and the wall so there’s nowhere for him to go. Peter slings one knee over Juno’s waist and grabs his wrists, then his hands, pins him to the pillows.

“That’s positively the sweetest thing I’ve heard you say all day,” he says.

“You don’t have to be a dick about it,” Juno says, but he doesn’t shove him off.

“I’m perfectly sincere and completely honest all of the time,” Peter says, and Juno frees one hand to smack him on the knee.

“Are some of them true?” Juno looks up at him, face framed between Peter’s hands. Peter leans forward and watches Juno’s gaze watch him. His pupil expands, he swallows. Peter imagines he can feel the pace of his heart in the space between them.

Their foreheads touch. Juno presses the line of his nose - Peter can feel the spot where it was broken once - against Peter’s own. Looking at him makes him go a bit crosseyed, which he exaggerates, and Juno sighs.

“Some of them are,” Peter murmurs. “Some of them aren’t. Some of them may be a bit less dramatic the way I remember them. Some of them more so.”

“And I suppose you want me to guess,” Juno says. He smiles, sideways.

“All the best stories have a grain of truth in them, darling. Especially the lies.”

How do you make a myth? Do something legendary, and live to tell the story until it has a life of its own.

“Twenty creds to me if I peg it right,” Juno says, and he shifts his hips under Peter’s knees. “I owe Rita twenty from last week and it’s gotta come from somewhere otherwise she’s gonna wring my neck.”

“We can’t have that,” Peter puts a hand there, feels Juno’s pulse under his fingers under the edge of his jaw. Then, in the hollow of his throat. Under his ribs. At the bend of his knees. Juno sighs and swallows the words and Peter grins against the inside of Juno’s knee, looks up at him. Juno’s fingers are braced against the headboard and Peter can see him breathing.

Juno swears when Peter kisses his hipbone, teeth and tongue, and he pushes his hips against Peter’s free hand when Peter touches him. His fingers catch Peter’s hair, winding through it, and Peter likes him like this, all braced with anticipation and un-self conscious about it. It makes him look younger, shadows of the person he must have been long before Peter met him. They both carry those shadows around, the places they came from. Peter, seventeen, wanted to save the world. Peter, somewhere in his thirties, hopes the world can wait until Juno Steel gets off.

Juno swears when Peter drags his tongue along the underside of his cock, a delightfully predictable reaction. Juno swears a lot when he doesn't know what else to say.

“Nureyev,” he says, teeth gritted, when Peter pauses and looks up at him. “For fuck’s sake, just -- “

“Just what?” Peter says it against the inside of Juno’s thigh, fingers catching the ridge of his kneecap, the line of his hips. He has a scar, the mark of a bullet, right above his left hipbone. Peter puts his mouth there, then the head of Juno’s cock, and when Juno pushes against him, fingers strong in Peter’s hair and breathing suddenly ragged, Peter lets him.

When Juno says his name -- “Peter” -- gasped out as he grinds against his mouth, Peter knows that it doesn’t mean anything else than what Juno wants to call him. That knowledge crawls up his spine and stays there, the way intimacy does, and secrets.

He raises his head, his own breathing unsteady and wild, like it doesn’t all fit inside his body. Juno’s eye flickers open and he’s about to swear again, or quip, or beg.

“Say it again,” Peter says, and he knows he sounds strange and desperate, something in between need and desire, but he doesn’t care.

“Peter,” Juno says. His fingers trace the line of Peter’s cheekbone, the curve of his mouth, and Peter doesn’t look away.

Peter thinks that he might trade all those stories in for this one. It’s had its ups and downs, and the ending is a little uncertain in the way that stories in their unfolding often are, but it doesn’t belong to anybody else but them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juno doesn’t suggest, optimistically or otherwise, that they might someday visit Brahma together. Someone else might, intending it to be some kind of comfort or promise. But Juno doesn’t even try, and Peter can’t help but be grateful for that.

Everyone’s an exile from something -- everyone has something they want to return to but can’t. A time, a place, an idea, a bed, a state of mind. In some ways, Peter considers himself lucky. He falls asleep to Hyperion City late-night traffic, and he dreams about home. It’s almost like being in two places at once.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Peter once heard someone say that love is a gambler whose dice are loaded. It’s a good thing, then, that he knows how to play for high stakes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He’s thirty five. That’s a lie. And he’s on the phone.

“No,” Juno says, snappy. “I have no fucking idea what it’s supposed to mean.”

“I’d suggest -- “ Peter is on the phone and he’s also in the middle of something else and he hadn’t been in a position to drop what he was doing when his comms device started ringing, but he also didn’t want to just not answer Juno’s call. So he’s a bit distracted, and short of breath. “I’d let Rita take a crack at it.”

“I don’t need my assistant to solve your damn puzzle for me!” Juno barks. Peter can picture him, hunched over his desk with an irritated expression on his face. He misses Mars very badly, all of a sudden. “And she couldn’t figure it out either,” Juno continues in a rush, and Peter laughs.

“You have two weeks to figure it out,” he says cheerfully. One foot, braced against the slick metal wall, slips a little, and Peter hits his knee on the wall. It echoes.

“Or you could just tell me,” Juno says. “‘Hello, Juno, I’d like you to come meet me at this place and this time and here’s why and it’s definitely not illegal.’ Just a suggestion. I do have a lot of other things I need to do with my time, you know.”

Above him, too far up to see considering the lack of light, Peter hears a noise. Someone’s footsteps on the ramp above, maybe. He drops his voice.

“Then I would run the risk of someone else reading my plans, love,” he says. “Caution is sometimes aggravating but always necessary.”

“I think you just get off on being cryptic,” Juno says. “Why are you whispering? Where are you?”

“Nowhere you need to be concerned with,” Peter says. A light has come on somewhere above him, and he presses himself against the wall as flat as he can. “I’ll give you a hint, shall I? Would that help?”

“Now you’re being condescending,” Juno says.

“I am not.”

“Yeah you are, I can tell. You do this thing with your voice. You sound like you do when you’re being Duke Rose.”

Peter grins, as much as his current position will allow. “And you noticed!”

“I’m not completely shit at my job.”

“Now I wouldn’t -- “ the light up above swings down, and Peter decides that his current position is no longer safe. “I’m terribly sorry to have to cut off this delightful banter,” he says, “but I’m afraid that I need both of my hands to continue descending this elevator shaft and rappelling equipment is really so much more complicated than it looks on the box, you know.”

“You -- what?”

“Call me if you need a hint, darling!” Peter says. “These two weeks will crawl by without you by my side, I’m sure, but they’ll be much worse if the man up there cuts these cables. Talk to you soon!”

He hangs up the phone against Juno’s shouted protest, and allows himself half a second to consider the way that Juno expresses affection by yelling. Then he straightens his shoulders, tightens his fingers on the rope, and gets to work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a seedy bar on Ganymede that makes the galaxy’s best lemontinis, and Peter’s well-travelled enough to know. He drinks two of them while he waits, flips through the news, reads a summary of the latest scandal to come from that situation on the Venus gas mines. There’s something delightfully juvenile about holding onto life’s little pleasures, it’s little moments. A martini too many while you’re waiting for someone to arrive.

Fingers, just for a second, on the back of his neck, almost hesitantly. Peter smiles.

“Well,” he says, turning his head and the line of his shoulders. Juno’s wearing black. He’s always wearing black. He leans his elbows on the counter as he sits down, seeking balance on the bar stool. “What’s a lady like you doing in a dive like this?”

“Meeting somebody,” Juno says, and he doesn’t smile but there’s something amused about the set of his shoulders.

“So I suppose that means I can’t buy you a drink, then,” Peter says.

“Well,” Juno shrugs, and he turns his face so he can look at Peter. “That depends.”

“Scotch, if you’ve got it,” Peter says to the bartender, “and mix me something that will surprise me.”

The bartender doesn’t, but that’s alright.

“What’s your name today, then?” Juno says when his drink arrives. He turns more completely, one elbow on the bar counter, and their knees touch. Peter mirrors him, recrosses his legs so they’re framed as opposites.

“Rani Stone,” he says, and Juno chokes on his Scotch.

“I think that one needs more work,” he says.

“It is a bit dated,” Peter replies. “I got better at them with practice, as one does. We’re meeting some very old friends, you see.”

“What do you do then, Mister Stone?” Juno manages it with a straight face for half a second.

“I’m a smuggler,” Peter says cheerfully.

Juno sighs heartily. “Of course you are,” he says. “And you smuggle what, exactly, or do I not want to know.”

“Well, if you were a detective from Mars who had some interest in where exactly the weaponized delivery drones that keep blowing up apartments in the heart of Hyperion City were coming from, you might want to pay attention. Especially if you were to discover they’re being designed by an engineering firm sponsored by the government of a lovely planet in the Outer Rim I know that yo visited once. But because you aren’t, and you are in fact my business partner -- you should already know, shouldn’t you? Or did you not read my note?”

“I see your point,” Juno says. “And I didn’t see a note, which I’m assuming you left in some exceedingly irritating place for me to find. I really don’t dig around in my couch cushions all that often you know.”

“It was pinned to the ceiling of your car, obviously.”

“You could just send me a fucking email like a normal person.”

“I could, but where would be the joy in that?”

“You better give me a crash course in weaponized delivery drones, then,” Juno says, crossing his arms.

Peter leans forward, rests his arm on the back of Juno’s chair alongside Juno’s own shoulder. Juno leans into it, just a little. From a distance anyone watching would think he was just being flirted with, because they wouldn’t see Juno’s hand on Peter’s knee.

“I’m serious,” Peter says. “You have to pay attention. I’ll quiz you afterwards.”

Juno’s hand moves several inches higher, to the inside of his thigh.

“Just so you know,” Peter says, "Rani Stone is a scrupulous man who has learned the hard way never to mix business with pleasure. He has a long history of deep space shuttle runs and he knows better.”

“Oh darn,” Juno’s face doesn’t change but his eye is bright and mischievous. “Well, his fashion sense is a little questionable, too.”

“He’s also terrible in bed. A bit of a boor. No family to speak of, poor fellow, never learned how to treat a lady.”

Juno nods, like he’s considering it. “Well,” he says, “luckily for me I know who you really are.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brahma lives like the magnetic center of a compass, right in the crown of his head. There’s an inevitability to the knowledge that someday he will go back there. Die there, probably, for narrative satisfaction if nothing else, and he doesn’t know where else he’d want his body to end up. But that is a very long way from now, and there are a million things between now and then to see, to do, to steal.

Brahma lives like a heartbeat, rewritten physics and bone knowledge across distance. A great and terrible story that almost demands someone just as great and terrible to stand up against it.

Wait for the opportune moment. Mag’s advice.

“I don’t understand why nobody does anything about this now!” Peter, twelve or thirteen, watches someone die in the street and he’s lived long enough to know that nobody looks at the body as they move away, trying to protect their own separate lives, their own fears for the future. But what he doesn’t understand is why. “Aren’t they angry? Aren’t you angry? If enough of us were angry couldn’t we stop it?”

“Sometimes being angry isn’t enough, Pete,” Mag says. “You have to be angry and you have to be smart and you have to have a plan. You have to know how you’re gonna get out, or you have to be big enough that they can’t hurt you. People are scared that they aren’t.”

Mag hadn't lived to see what Peter did next. 

Peter would die for Brahma. He wonders sometimes if Juno understands that. But that will come if it comes.

And living for it -- biding his time --

 

 

 

 

 

Some things change with time. Some things don't. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We have an hour until we’re expected,” Peter says. “Want to get out of here?”

“I don’t know, Mister Stone,” Juno says. “I just met you.”

He’s teasing, but it doesn’t feel funny.

“My name’s Peter Nureyev,” Peter says, almost under his breath, and Juno stands up.

“Yeah,” he says, and the corner of his mouth crinkles. “Him I’d go home with.”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> junosteeled.tumblr.com. please come say hi! please come talk to me about this podcast before i drop dead! 
> 
> if you want to know what juno did while he was on his depression journey brahma -- well -- cait's writing that fic so you just have to wait. 
> 
> did peter say 'aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?' when juno busted him out of jail? no, because peter likes living, but he thought it probably.


End file.
